“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.” — John Updike, Self-Consciousness, 1989.
We live in strange times. Until recently, with the world stuck indoors, bored and fretful, nervously checking the news and avoiding contact with everyone except the person delivering Uber Eats or the online grocery order, it seems fatuous to even mention going dahn the pub.
In fact, since I moved to the South of France my visits to the ‘boozer’ for anything other than a full Irish breakfast (at Ma Nolan’s, by the Port de Nice or the flower market) are precisely zilch. Such is my pitiful level of alcohol consumption in middle age that I have a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau I nabbed from Carrefour in November that’s still resolutely unopened. Not so Nouveau after all then.
However, given that I’m self-denied access to drunks in person, perhaps it’s fitting to celebrate a spot of rampaging drunkenness as seen on TV. And when it comes to televised bibulousness, the great Irish playwright Brendan Behan was the Edmund Hillary of the form, or the Oliver Reed before colour.
Both one hundred years ago, Behan achieved the remarkable twin feat of being the first man seen under the influence on British television, and the first person to say “Fuck” on the same show, during a live interview on BBC’s Panorama on June 18, 1956.
The Dubliner’s play The Quare Fellow was running in London at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East; it was a hit (coded gay character as The Other Fellow and all), and was shortly to transfer to the West End. Behan was booked to appear on the BBC1 flagship discussion show to discuss his work with that well-known occupier of the moral high ground, Malcolm Muggeridge.
This is where I can claim a personal connection. A personal friend of Margaret Thatcher who was instrumental in bringing Mother Theresa to popular attention in the West, the evangelist “family values” crusader was a noted television scourge and scold, and for decades an inescapable figure in British cultural life, whether you liked it or not.
Never one to shy away from controversy, Muggeridge famously referred to Queen Elizabeth II as “dowdy, frumpish and banal”; for which the BBC fired him. Though, like a homing pigeon, he was back before long, locking horns with the delectable Diana Rigg on Parkinson over sex outside marriage, as the game girl stood up for the gays.
Though, thanks to the wonders of YouTube, he’s probably best-remembered now for his unfettered hostility to John Cleese and Michael Palin over Monty Python’s Life Of Brian on an episode of Friday Night, Saturday Morning, gamely adjudicated by Tim Rice in 1979.
The Mug was also my father’s second cousin, however removed. (The truth retold, not removed enough.)
Historian and social theorist Daniel Boorstin defined a celebrity as a person who is known for his well-knownness. And The Mug is credited with having also used that idea in the introduction to his 1967 book Muggeridge Through The Microphone, in which he wrote: “In the past if someone was famous or notorious, it was for something — as a writer or an actor or a criminal; some talent or distinction or abomination. Today one can simply be famous for being famous.”
Possessing an unerring sense of the absurd, on the afternoon of the Panorama programme, Muggeridge met Behan at the Garrick Club to discuss the broadcast. At the Garrick, the potty poet drank Scotch as the club’s bar didn’t serve beer, and refused his wife’s entreaties to eat anything, so by the time he arrived at the BBC’s Lime Grove Studios in Shepherd’s Bush he was already pretty spiffed.
But the run-through was a success, and the producers were confident that it would be a memorable TV encounter. This turned out to be the case, but for reasons other than foreseen: between the rehearsal and the live broadcast, Brendan drank whisky in the hospitality suite and became increasingly leery to the other guests, which included a War Office delegation and a group of debutantes who fled the green room after Behan’s remarks got too personal.
By the time Panorama was due to air, Behan was almost incapable; but, despite mounting panic from the suits at the Beeb, Muggeridge, who wasn’t altogether unknown in outraging the establishment himself, insisted that the interview should go ahead, save for one condition: If Behan referred on-air to a certain part of female anatomy, it was all over.
The Irish rover started the interview but kicking off his shoes, and things came quickly unglued from there. Producers probably wished he had been completely inaudible, because his first words were that he needed to take a leak. A resourceful worker had taken the precaution off-camera of propping the playwright up, otherwise Behan would have quietly slid to the floor.
A fellow guest on the show, Irish-American actor Jackie Gleason, reportedly said about the incident: “It wasn’t an act of God, but an act of Guinness!” The two outsiders went on to forge a friendship. Behan loved the story of how, walking along the street in London shortly after this episode, a Cockney approached him and exclaimed that he understood every word he had said—drunk or not—but had not a clue what “that bugger Muggeridge was on about!”
Several bizarre and embarrassing minutes ensued, with The Mug bringing the proceedings to a merciful close by successfully prevailing on the inebriated Irishman to sing a song from his own play. The pickled poet indeed clambered on stage and slurred an off-key rendition of The Quare Fellow’s signature song, The Auld Triangle. At some point, the soused singer also let out the expletive “fuck”, which was gleefully reported in the majority of newspapers the following day.
And thus it was that Brendan Behan, shoeless, his shirt awry, and comprehensively shitfaced, slurred his way through a live TV interview, said the F-word – and became an immediate celebrity.
The transfer of his production to Broadway provided Behan with international recognition. The template was set for all the others and the die was cast for the republican raconteur, whose fame as a loquacious drunk soon outstripped his reputation as a trenchant playwright and poet.
Sadly, Behan’s Panorama interview is lost to the ether, but Peter Sellers’ take on it is highly enjoyable. See, George Martin did have a sense of humour before he became the fifth Beatle. Muggeridge would later sum up the episode in the July 26, 1970 edition of the Observer, with his typical way of impaling the pompous on the lance of his lethally keen wit.
“My TV interview with Brendan Behan is to me a memorable one, because he was drunk and did not utter throughout it one single comprehensible word. For Behan the experience was decisive. The papers next day were full of him and, Miss [Joan] Littlewood told me, several West End managements, hitherto uninterested in his play, telephoned offering to put it on. So Behan learnt, and he was quick to learn – there was a crafty, calculating side to him – that one drunken, speechless television appearance brought more of the things he wanted, like money and notoriety and a neon glory about his head, than any number of hours with a pen in his hand.”
The sad thing about Brendan Behan is that far, far more has been written about him than he managed to write himself. Great talent brought low by substance abuse is wrenching indeed to watch.
The spud-faced bastard.
Steve Pafford
